Authors Guidelines

Important announcement for authors

Authors are reminds to plan  approximately 6 to 8 months, and those in a hurry authors are advised to send their manuscripts to other journals. Processing time may be increase due to delayed response of the reviewer, or if the author does not follow instructions, which may lead to defects, which will be discovered during the initial scrutiny, internal review and must be corrected before being sent to the external review.(KAP studies, routine surveys etc & study more than 3 years old are not accepted)

 Annals of PIMS is a double blind double peer-reviewed quarterly published journal that serves as a medium for the latest advancement of scientific knowledge in all the branches of Medicine, Surgery and Dental and its allied sciences and publication of scientific investigation in these fields.

Annals of PIMS follows the ICMJE guidelines “Recommendations for the Conduct,Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly work" in medical journals; available at: http://icmje.org/recommendations/

Authors Guidelines

Submission Process:

All manuscripts for Annals of PIMS should be submitted through online submission system through the journal website: http://apims.net/index.php/apims. The author, who is generally the corresponding author, is responsible for the manuscript during the submission and peer-review process. The corrresonding author must ensure that all co-authors have read and approved the submitted version of the manuscript. For submission of the mansuccript author must Register and Login in the OJS.

Note: During the upload submission i.e.(Step 1, Step 2 & Step 3), author should ensure that other mandatory documents  i.e (step 2 undertaking)and(step 3 Ethical approval letter) have been attached including the soft copy of the manuscript. Without these documents article will not be processed.

Submission format according to Manuscript type
Title of the Manuscript
Title Page: The complete title of the manuscript, the name of all the authors with qualifications, the afflifated department or institution, address for correspondence with telephone numbers,  cell phones, e-mail, and short running title of the article, source of funding, and total word count.

ABSTRACT:

      1. All original articles must accompany a structured abstract upto 250 words. It should include  Objective  of  the study, Methodology, Results  & Conclusions. (Selection of study subjects or experimental  animals; observational and analytical methods, give specific data and their statistical significance, if possible). Emphasise new and important  aspects of the study or observations. This page should contain structured abstract and key words only. abstract should reflect the content of the article accurately. 
      2. Abstract for case report,short communications, clinical note, letter to the editor and narrative reviews should be non structured upto 150 words.
      3. All review articles should be preceded by a summary. Authors submitting review manuscript should include a section describing the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting and synthesizing data, data bases searched and the time period. These methods should also be summarized in the abstract.
      4. Keywords: Use terms from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) list of index medicus, if suitable MeSH terms are not yet available for recently introduced terms, present terms may be used.

Introduction: This section should be written as deductive approach. This should mention the background and the rationale for the study, with reference to national, regional and international literature.It should also described briefly the purpose of the study. It should neither review the subject extensively nor it should have data or conclusions of the study.

Methodology: This section should include the following without subheadings in an organized manner.

      • Ethical review statement
      • Study design and settings
      • Study duration
      • Sampling method and sample size calculations with reference
      • Inclusion and exclusion criteria
      • Details of apparatus (if applicable with manufacture’s name and address) and or drugs/chemicals used. Use generic name/s of drugs/ chemicals along with dose (s) and route(s) of administration
        Statistics should clearly include the tests applied along with statistical software package used with version.

 For patients, age, sex with mean age ± standard deviation must be given. Statistical method must be mentioned and specify any general computer programme used.

Results: This section should include results explained in a logical manner through text, graphs and tables. Avoid repetitions of data shown through tables and figures in the text. Extra or supplementary materials and technical details can be placed in an appendix where it will be accessible.

Discussion:This section should present findings of the study. significant findings should be discussed comparing with results of other published studies. Repetition of results should be avoided.  Emphasize the new and important aspects of the study and the conclusions that follow from them. It must be mentioned whether the hypothesis mentioned in the article  is true, false or no conclusions can be derived. Strengths and limitations should be mentioned at the end of this section.

Conclusion(s): Briefly summarize the net findings of your study without over emphasizing them.  It should not include any findings / benefits not mentioned in the results. 

Acknowledgements: Names and contributions of people who do not qualify for the authorship but helped in the study may be listed in this section with their permission.

Disclosure/Conflict of Interest: Disclose if the current manuscript has been presented or published in a conference or abstract book or if it is a part of thesis/project. Any conflict of interest should be declared.  It may include honorarium, funding, credits and promotion which are not unethical but should be declared. Authors must disclose all sources of funding received along with their expenditure. If there are no funding sources, the authors should include “none to declare”.

Tables and Figures: These should be included in the text as per manuscript requirement. These should be easy to interpret and not be repetitive of results/data already discussed in the text. Tables should be numbered in Roman numerals. Title should be short and explanatory and written on the top. Foot note should explain abbreviations if used. Statistical results should include standard deviation and standard error of mean. Source should be given of any data/table from published articles. Maximum Number of tables and figures for original articles should be 4, for review article should be 5, for case report should be 4, and for short communication should be 2. Refer to table number in relevant section of your manuscript.

Units of measurement: for reporting in the text they should be Conventional with System International (SI) units given in parenthesis.  The names of drugs should be written in generic terminology.

References

All references should be cited in Vancouver style and give citations in text as superscript. While citing articles use references of published articles and avoid personal communications and unpublished observations. . These references should also be marked in the text. To minimize errors author should verify references against the original documents. The References should be written in Vancouver style as per "Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly work in medical journals. Updated Dec. 2015. Available at: http://icmje.org/recommendations/". List all authors when there are six or fewer. If there are seven or more list the first six followed by ”et al” Reference should provide the following information: Author’s name with initials, full title of cited article, name of the journal in which the article appeared (in abbreviated form), Year of Publication, Journal’s Volume, Number and finally first & the last page numbers. Write Page No. like this 120-126. Add DOI number of those references where it is available. 

Examples

Reference from original article: Memon ZA, Shaikh AA, Qureshi SS, Mughal F, Singha SP, Qureshi MA. Histomorphometric Effcets of Oral use of Tobacco in Testes of Offsprings of Swiss Albino Mice. Ann Pak inst Med Sci. 2018;14(4):256-262.

Reference from books:Kodkany BS, Derman RA. Pitfalls in assessing blood loss and decision to transfer.In:B-Lynch CB, Keith LG, Lalonde AB, Karaoshi M, editors. A text book of postpartum haemorrhage.*Chapter 4.Dumfrieshire, UK: Sapiens Publishing ; 2006.p.35-45.

Reference from website: Memon ZA, Shaikh AA, Qureshi SS, Mughal F, Singha SP, Qureshi MA. Histomorphometric Effcets of Oral use of Tobacco in Testes of Offsprings of Swiss Albino Mice.[internet]. Islamabad.SZABMU/PIMS.[2018-12-28].Available from: URL.https://apims.net/index.php/apims/article/view/180

Case reports 
It consist of unique cases either diagnosed or reporting of treatment, In general, all case reports include the following components: an abstract, an introduction, a case, and a discussion.

Word limits and number of references: Word limit for submission of each manuscript is as under excluding Abstract & References

Manuscript Type Word limit References
Original Article 3000 20-25
Review Article 4000 35-40
Case Report 2000 10
Short communication/Letter to the editor 1500 5-10

Ethical Approval of the Research [Back]

Submission of certificate from hospital/ institutional ethical committee/ board with manuscript is mandatory. Strict adherence to ethical standards should be observed while dealing with subjects. Studies on human subjects must indicate explicitly that the procedures followed were in line with the revised “Helsinki Declaration” of 1983. Detailed guidelines are available from the following link:
https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/doh-oct1983/.  Manuscripts of animal studies should clearly indicate that National Research Council guidelines on care & use of laboratory animals were followed. The guidelines on animal research ethics is available from; http://veteditors.org/ethicsconsensusguideline.html

To safe guard the rights and welfare of human subjects participating in biomedical research, ethical approval must be obtained for all manuscripts from the Hospital/ Institutional Ethical Committee(s) of the concerned organization(s). All the ethical approval(s), in case of multicenter studies should accompany the manuscript in writing. The approval(s) must be accompanied by the Registration number(s) of the letter(s) of approval of trial/study, if available.

Author`s Undertaking:[Back]

      • Letter of undertaking for exclusive submission to Annals of PIMS.
      • Complete author Correspodant Address Including phone no, email, postal address
      • Hospital/Institutional ethical committee/board approval letter.
      • Contribution to authorship (as mentioned in the form).
      • Competing interest (or disclosure of conflicts).
      • Funding sources (if any).
      • Data spread sheet (if asked)
      • Disclouser Statement: If the submiited manuscript is based from Dissertation or Thesis, The author must attached the Dissertation/thesis approval letter given by the University/College.[Back]

Noraml review process for a mansucript evaluation will take about 3-4 months.

Fast Track Processing of manuscript (Temporally STOP)[Back]

The duration of the fast track processing is approximately 40 days. If the author wants to get his/her manuscript through fast track, He/she should clearly mention it on the covering letter. Rs. 2000 will be charge at the time of submission of each manuscript, and after the acceptance, if recommended by the reviewers as well as the editorial board, the author will pay the remaining publication charges i.e. Rs 6000/-
The fast track charges are non refundable. The rest of the term and conditions will remain constent.

Publication Charges [Back]

      • After acceptance of the manuscript, the author has to submit publication charges of Rs 5500 for the original article, review article, and;

      • Rs 2000 for case reports, short communication, and audit reports, etc, as decided by the editorial board for handling and publication of the manuscript. ( Accounts details are given below)

      • Currently, the journal does not print hard copies. Only online copies are retained and are being saved as archives in the digital depository to arrange a backup in case of failure or interruption on the website.

      • Furthermore, if the author wants to get the print of the specified copy of the journal, a sum of Rs. 3300/-per copy will be charged (digital printing) through our official printer only , including courier charges that will be paid by the author. Please email journal@szabmu.edu.pk with volume, issue, and published year for hard copy printing requests.

      • Title of account for cross cheque/pay order is “SZABMU Fee and Dues  â€. Publication fee may also be transferred through online, details are given below: Account No: 3016856019
         
        Branch Code1780
        National Bank of Pakistan PIMS Branch ,
        Branch Code 1780.
        IBAN: PK34NBPA17803016856019

Waivers Policy

We grant publication charges waivers under very limited conditions. Request for waivers or discounts should be made during submission. Requests for waivers or ad hoc discounts made while an article is being peer reviewed or after it has been accepted will not be granted. Each request is considered on a case-by-case basis. 

Color Charges for Print[Back]

The color-in-print option. Each printed page on which color occurs is charged at Rs 5000/- per page.Otherwise the given pictures will be printed as a grayscale.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that color figures are understandable when converted to grayscale for the print version and that text references and captions are appropriate for both online and print versions.

Open Access Publication and Creative Commons Licensing [Back]
The work published by Annals of PIMS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

The content published in Annals of PIMS may be shared, copied, and redistributed in any medium or format, and may be adapted, remixed, transformed, and built upon by others. Authors retain the rights to freely download and distribute the full text of their work, as well as to share and disseminate the article without any restrictions, using any means including Twitter, scholarly collaboration networks such as Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Facebook, and any other professional or academic networking site.